Monthly Archives: March 2007

How much is a housewife worth?

It was in her 1964 book Sixpence in Her Shoe that Phyllis McGinley observed that to be a housewife is "sometimes an ungrateful job if it is looked on only as a job. Regarded as a profession, it is the noblest as it is the most ancient of the catalogue. Let none persuade us differently or the world is lost indeed."

John Charman might bear this in mind if he is to reach even a vague understanding of what it is to be a housewife. A self-made insurance tycoon worth £131m, Charman and his wife Beverley began divorce proceedings in 2004, after 27 years of marriage. Last year, the high court decided that Mrs Charman was worth £48m (37% of the couple’s assets). Mr Charman this week appealed that she is deserving of only £20m, with his legal representatives pointedly referring to her as a "housewife". The decision, he argued, "failed to have proper regard for the contribution I made by being the only one to create the wealth".

Really? More than a decade ago, a report by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics stated that to employ all the cooks, cleaners, chauffeurs and nannies needed to meet a housewife’s annual contribution to the home would cost $120,900 (£62,590). A fair settlement would also take into account a woman’s loss of earnings from the career she abandoned – Mrs Charman, for example, was a civil servant. It is also arguable that Mrs Charman’s financial worth is greater still, as without her contribution to the household, her husband could not have pursued his immense fortune.

"This is a very unusual case," says Katherine Rake of the Fawcett Society, which campaigns for gender equality, "so we wouldn’t comment specifically on it, but we would say that divorce has a negative impact on women’s economic circumstances that lasts much longer than it does for men."

Ok, only one sentence is this whole article bugs me: "It is also arguable that Mrs Charman’s financial worth is greater still, as without her contribution to the household, her husband could not have pursued his immense fortune. " It doesn’t say whether they had children or not, but what could she possibly have done at home that allowed her husband to pursue his immense fortune? If they had children, he could have hired a nanny, a babysitter, etc. What did she do that otherwise would have kept him home?

"…a few of our meeting sites we noticed that there are several but not all meetings in March that are recurring meetings that are showing up twice yet the second link is not active."

I go to the site and sure enough, some (not all) of the dates were duplicated. "Strange," thought I…

Then it hit me: DST! The duplicate entries started after 7 March and end with 28 March.

SharePoint responds to the change with double entries to cover both time zones because its not ready to change yet. Since I knew that the patch had already been applied to the servers, SharePoint must have gotten confused somehow.

I have an upcoming business trip. Nothing too terribly different from other business meetings that I’ve had, except this one is in Hawaii. The thing about this trip is that I wll be on the plane slightly less than on the island. 12 hours in the air, 24 hours on the island….and I thought my 2 days in Switzerland was short…